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Former resident about to release novel

BLACKFOOT — When Rachel McClellan was growing up, she never planned to become an author; she just enjoyed writing stories.
However, this former Blackfoot resident is now using her fiction writing skills to contribute to the young adult fiction genre. Her first novel, “Fractured Light”, is receiving superb reviews from other authors and is highly rated on Goodreads, a popular website for book recommendations, by those who have previewed the novel.
McClellan decided to become an author during a trip to Ireland in 2007. She went to Ireland to fulfill her mother’s dream of visiting the land of their ancestors. Something about Ireland encouraged her to write novels.
“Maybe it was one of [my mother’s] pesky ghost relatives who possessed me with all these strange story ideas,” jokes McClellan.
McClellan’s “strange story ideas” are part of the reason “Fractured Light” is generating positive buzz. Readers enjoy the unique plot.
In the story, 17-year-old Llona Reese is an Aura, which means she has the power of manipulating light. This power causes her to be targeted by the deadly Vykens and Llona must learn to fight in order to survive. McClellan says she always played with the idea of auras and light manipulation, but her idea for her main character did not come about until she was completing a writing exercise with a friend.
While McClellan wrote about a funeral experience for the exercise, she imagined a girl with white hair and this led to the plot for “Fractured Light”.
McClellan states that she wrote “Fractured Light” for young adults because she worked with teenagers for many years and noticed that everything is fresh and new with them, including romance.
“Some of my favorite words are ‘terribly romantic,’” she explains. “When people grow older and have kids, they become jaded.”
“Fractured Light” will be released on Feb. 8. “Fractured Light” will be the first book in a trilogy. The second book of the series, tentatively called “Fractured Truth,” will be released in February 2013.